Rattle conducted this work at Glyndebourne with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in 2001: his account there was rhythmically taut, heavily accented, fast apart from one or two unaccountably slow speeds, for the duet, ‘O namen, namenlose Freude’, for example. The approach is much the same here in a concert performance in Berlin following staged ones at the Salzburg Easter Festival, but somewhat underlined by the Berlin Philharmonic’s denser sound.

Every bar is super-energised, the playing is crisp, almost peremptory, with small chance for any kind of individuality of phrase. To put it baldly, the reading smacks of control-freakery, although that is less true of Act 2, where at last, and rather late on, Rattle begins to take account of the opera’s beating heart. His orchestra plays efficiently, with many fine solo contributions, but I found the soul for the most part missing from the whole. Where is the inner wonder of the Canon Quartet, where the sense of desperation in Leonore’s ‘Abscheulicher’, where the searing appeal in the Prisoners’ Chorus? The Arnold Schoenberg Choir sing it very well but with little sense of the human feeling less well-equipped opera choruses find in it (compare Böhm’s Bavarian State Opera Chorus). In the work’s finale they are so hard-driven, and given so little time to breathe, that it seems anything but a joyful catharsis.

Where the singers are concerned, even before comparisons are made, they hardly seem in the front rank, the Jaquino and Don Fernando – the ever-admirable Thomas Quasthoff – excepted; but one does not buy a set of Fidelio for those characters. Until the duet in the dungeon, Angela Denoke’s Leonore seems curiously anonymous and careful, not what one wants at such moments as ‘O du für den ich alles trug’ or the whole of ‘Abscheulicher’. At the top of her register Denoke often sounds over-stretched, and her pitching can be iffy. You don’t need to go further back than to the Naxos set to hear a soprano, Inga Nielsen, who invests all of Leonore’s significant phrases with the conviction and understanding which Denoke seldom evinces.

Her Florestan is even more disappointing. Although Jon Villars has all the notes for the part, his voice is afflicted with a tight vibrato and an unpleasing timbre, his German is indifferent and, like his Leonore, he makes little of the text. Again you have only to hear Naxos’s Florestan, the late and lamented Gösta Winbergh, to find out what a singer with longer experience of the role in the theatre and a truly heroic ring to his voice can make of it. Neither artist on the new version sings their part as though their life depended on it, surely a sine qua non.

Juliane Banse is typically appealing as Marzelline, but – and I felt this before I had ascertained who was singing the role – her voice has taken on a distinctly mezzo-ish tinge, not quite right for the part. Alan Held’s gritty baritone may not be thought inappropriate for Pizarro, but there are better takers of the part elsewhere. László Polgár is a sturdy, firm-voiced, quite sympathetic Rocco without quite the requisite heft and presence provided by, say, Frick for Klemperer or Moll for Halász and, in wonderful form, for Böhm.

But perhaps my greatest reservation here concerns the dialogue. It has been cut to the minimum and it is then spoken in a curiously stilted, reserved manner quite inappropriate to the text. It is so foreshortened that poor Florestan is left only with a plaintive ‘Leonore’ at the end of the Dungeon Quartet. I found this so disconcerting that I went back to see if my CD had jumped a passage. Turn for a sense of a real drama to Klemperer or Böhm, and you will see how more of the dialogue, properly delivered, can add to the truthfulness of a performance.

I would judge from strange hiatuses that some of it was patched separately in the studio after the musical performance, which is by the way recorded with breadth and immediacy. In that respect it scores over the Naxos, a reading that is also, in the modern way, on the fastish side; but it goes nearer the heart of the piece than the new EMI. The 40-year-old Klemperer comes, of course, out of a different (and happier?) tradition.

In the middle stands the Böhm, recorded with a real sense of the theatre in the acoustically ideal Nationaltheater at Munich in 1978 (with admittedly some stage noise) and speeds that are fast without being breathless. He is blessed with a fine cast headed by Hildegard Behrens at her soul-searching best (a quite unforgettable ‘Abscheulicher’ and ‘Noch Heute’), Lucia Popp (a dream Marzelline), James King and Donald McIntyre. There one surely comes close to the heart of an often elusive masterpiece. Those who want what amounts to the music and little else and appreciate Rattle’s abrupt ways may think otherwise, though even they may like to be reminded of the Decca/Maazel set of a similar cut and boasting a superior cast.